1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to video recorders and, in particular but not exclusively, to arrangements for locating desired contents on a video tape.
2. Description of the Related Art
Known indexing systems in video recorders provide an attractive and user friendly way of obtaining easy access to a desired position on the tape for recording or playback of a program. Such arrangements generally enable access to a non-volatile memory in the video recorder in which a list of the contents of a number of tapes are stored. Access to the list relevant to a particular tape is by means of entering a tape number allocated to that tape. This access may be manual or automatic if means for identifying a particular tape is provided. This list can be viewed on the associated television display and moving a cursor to a desired item can be made to cause the tape to wind automatically to the corresponding position ready for playback or to record a new item.
Such an arrangement is disclosed in for example Patent Abstracts of Japan, Publication No. 07021748A. Such systems have, however, the disadvantage that the indexing only functions when the tapes are inserted into the VCR on which they were recorded, since the information as to what is on the tape is only present in the memory within that VCR. As a result, the indexing system will not work if the tape is played in a different VCR.
A system is described in European Patent Application EPA 0692790 for indexing magnetic tapes. This publication discloses a magnetic recording/reproducing apparatus having a capability of allowing contents of records on a magnetic tape to be discriminatively identified, and a capability for displaying closed captions includes a tape map memory for storing contents recorded on a tape and a tape map controller. As a manual input facility, a tape map button, a caption button, a playback button, a stop button and others, are provided. Upon loading of a tape undergone recording(s), the tape map button is pushed to display, on a monitor screen, tape map information concerning the contents of program(s) recorded on the loaded tape, temporal duration(s) of the programs and history of playback of the tape.
The closed caption data transmission facility is one provided in the USA and is not widely available elsewhere. It has been designed for the provision of subtitles for the hard of hearing and has been designed as a system in such a way that it is readily recordable on a VHS standard video recorder. As described in EPA 0692790, the closed caption data is extended to enable indexing information to be encoded in the same way and to derive program information from the transmitted closed caption transmissions. Such an arrangement is not useful in most European countries as there are no closed caption transmissions.